Renata Adler Quotes

People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.

~ Renata Adler

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

~ Renata Adler

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

~ Renata Adler

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That writers write is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.

~ Renata Adler

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

~ Renata Adler

But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life

~ Renata Adler

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

~ Renata Adler

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

~ Renata Adler

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

~ Renata Adler

The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

~ Renata Adler

The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

~ Renata Adler